In Crystallo Organometallic Chemistry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaleb Reid ◽  
David Charles Powers

X-ray crystallography is an invaluable tool in design and development of organometallic catalysis, but application typically requires species to display sufficiently high solution concentrations and lifetimes for single crystalline samples...

Molecules ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 1030 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Maveyraud ◽  
Lionel Mourey

With the advent of structural biology in the drug discovery process, medicinal chemists gained the opportunity to use detailed structural information in order to progress screening hits into leads or drug candidates. X-ray crystallography has proven to be an invaluable tool in this respect, as it is able to provide exquisitely comprehensive structural information about the interaction of a ligand with a pharmacological target. As fragment-based drug discovery emerged in the recent years, X-ray crystallography has also become a powerful screening technology, able to provide structural information on complexes involving low-molecular weight compounds, despite weak binding affinities. Given the low numbers of compounds needed in a fragment library, compared to the hundreds of thousand usually present in drug-like compound libraries, it now becomes feasible to screen a whole fragment library using X-ray crystallography, providing a wealth of structural details that will fuel the fragment to drug process. Here, we review theoretical and practical aspects as well as the pros and cons of using X-ray crystallography in the drug discovery process.


Crystals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 194
Author(s):  
Anna V. Vologzhanina ◽  
Yulia V. Nelyubina

Relations between physicochemical properties of chemical compounds exploited in many modern applications (including optical, magnetic, electrical, mechanical, and others) and interatomic interactions that operate in their crystals are the key to the successful design of new crystalline materials, in which X-ray crystallography has proved to be an invaluable tool [...]


Author(s):  
Jules S. Jaffe ◽  
Robert M. Glaeser

Although difference Fourier techniques are standard in X-ray crystallography it has only been very recently that electron crystallographers have been able to take advantage of this method. We have combined a high resolution data set for frozen glucose embedded Purple Membrane (PM) with a data set collected from PM prepared in the frozen hydrated state in order to visualize any differences in structure due to the different methods of preparation. The increased contrast between protein-ice versus protein-glucose may prove to be an advantage of the frozen hydrated technique for visualizing those parts of bacteriorhodopsin that are embedded in glucose. In addition, surface groups of the protein may be disordered in glucose and ordered in the frozen state. The sensitivity of the difference Fourier technique to small changes in structure provides an ideal method for testing this hypothesis.


Author(s):  
S. Cusack ◽  
J.-C. Jésior

Three-dimensional reconstruction techniques using electron microscopy have been principally developed for application to 2-D arrays (i.e. monolayers) of biological molecules and symmetrical single particles (e.g. helical viruses). However many biological molecules that crystallise form multilayered microcrystals which are unsuitable for study by either the standard methods of 3-D reconstruction or, because of their size, by X-ray crystallography. The grid sectioning technique enables a number of different projections of such microcrystals to be obtained in well defined directions (e.g. parallel to crystal axes) and poses the problem of how best these projections can be used to reconstruct the packing and shape of the molecules forming the microcrystal.Given sufficient projections there may be enough information to do a crystallographic reconstruction in Fourier space. We however have considered the situation where only a limited number of projections are available, as for example in the case of catalase platelets where three orthogonal and two diagonal projections have been obtained (Fig. 1).


Author(s):  
Robert A. Grant ◽  
Laura L. Degn ◽  
Wah Chiu ◽  
John Robinson

Proteolytic digestion of the immunoglobulin IgG with papain cleaves the molecule into an antigen binding fragment, Fab, and a compliment binding fragment, Fc. Structures of intact immunoglobulin, Fab and Fc from various sources have been solved by X-ray crystallography. Rabbit Fc can be crystallized as thin platelets suitable for high resolution electron microscopy. The structure of rabbit Fc can be expected to be similar to the known structure of human Fc, making it an ideal specimen for comparing the X-ray and electron crystallographic techniques and for the application of the molecular replacement technique to electron crystallography. Thin protein crystals embedded in ice diffract to high resolution. A low resolution image of a frozen, hydrated crystal can be expected to have a better contrast than a glucose embedded crystal due to the larger density difference between protein and ice compared to protein and glucose. For these reasons we are using an ice embedding technique to prepare the rabbit Fc crystals for molecular structure analysis by electron microscopy.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marat Korsik ◽  
Edwin Tse ◽  
David Smith ◽  
William Lewis ◽  
Peter J. Rutledge ◽  
...  

<p></p><p>We have discovered and studied a <i>tele</i>substitution reaction in a biologically important heterocyclic ring system. Conditions that favour the <i>tele</i>-substitution pathway were identified: the use of increased equivalents of the nucleophile or decreased equivalents of base, or the use of softer nucleophiles, less polar solvents and larger halogens on the electrophile. Using results from X-ray crystallography and isotope labelling experiments a mechanism for this unusual transformation is proposed. We focused on this triazolopyrazine as it is the core structure of the <i>in vivo </i>active anti-plasmodium compounds of Series 4 of the Open Source Malaria consortium.</p> <p> </p> <p>Archive of the electronic laboratory notebook with the description of all conducted experiments and raw NMR data could be accessed via following link <a href="https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/21890">https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/21890</a> . For navigation between entries of laboratory notebook please use file "Strings for compounds in the article.pdf" that works as a reference between article codes and notebook codes, also this file contain SMILES for these compounds. </p><br><p></p>


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